When setting out to achieve anything as a marketer, it is always important to have some set goals. These will not only point you in the right direction but will also outline your trajectory allowing you to look at the small steps you need to take to get where you need to be. What’s more, they also allow you to measure your progress and to see what’s working and what isn’t.

So how do you go about setting goals as a social media marketer? Let’s break it down…

Numbers

One of the simplest and most straightforward ways to look at your success in social media is to measure the number of followers/subscribers you have. Over time, if you are posting content that people enjoy and if you are marketing yourself well, you should find people signing up and getting involved.

While this is the most obvious figure to concentrate on though, it can also be a mistake. As we’ll see below, there are other factors that can provide more useful goals.

Engagement

But numbers alone don’t paint a complete picture of your success. In fact, it’s possible to buy several thousand followers for a relatively low sum but what you’ll find is that this doesn’t do much for you as those followers won’t be engaging with your content.

Engagement means that people are responding to your posts, that they are PMing you, that they are liking/favoriting your comments etc. In turn, this shows that they’re actually finding what you’re sharing interesting and that makes them much more likely to buy the products you recommend or to share your posts with their own network.

You can usually see your engagement by looking at your stats/analytics. Consider that it’s better to have a few highly engaged users than it is to have thousands of unengaged users – concentrate on this number!

Sales

If you were only to focus on one thing as a marketer, this would likely be the number you’d want to pay attention to. The number of sales you get will of course be a result of your followers and engagement and ultimately this is what those things will be serving: your profit.

If you want to keep things simple by looking at just one thing to drive up, this is the number to look at. Bear in mind though, that short-term sales won’t always mean long term sales, which is why it’s normally better to look at a combination of factors.